The 2007 Forced Road Trip: California to Tennessee

by Jennifer Brady

for Advanced Composition, East TN State U, December 2011

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
-Mark Twain

As I climbed into the back of my mother’s SUV that cool Monday summer morning I knew life as I knew it was about to change. Everything I owned, with the exception of a week’s worth of clothes and reading material, rested in a moving van travelling to a place I had no desire to go. Where my belongings were did not matter, I was more concerned with the misery and dread of crossing the country in a Mitsubishi Montero with my mother and aunt a week after graduating Buena High School. I was moving from sunny Ventura, California to the buckle of the Bible Belt—a place called Telford--and I refused to even consider being happy with this relocation.

If you haven’t figured it out already, I moved against my will. Let me turn back the clock a few years. In 2005 the death of my alcoholic-diabetic father was the loss of the only source of income my family had. He died due to complications with his diabetes and liver failure (from the years of excessive drinking) less than two months before I turned 16. The man made nearly six figures a year and that was great for a family of four living in Southern California (the rent in the house I grew up in was $1,400 per month, which was considered cheap). He supported me, my mother, and my sister, who had moved from Ventura to Los Angeles to attend college at Cal. State University of Long Beach when I entered high school. After my father’s death, the government sent me social security checks that my mom used to keep us in our house until I graduated high school in June 2007. My mom had no skill that would allow us to stay in California because work for a secretary who had been employed for 8 years would have been difficult to find.

I accepted the move after exhausting all other options. I tried to convince my aunt in Ventura to let me stay with her and I briefly thought about living with friends until I could get a job, car, and driver’s license. I did not initially take into account that I did not have a job. In the end, all options led to moving with my mom as a means to avoid homelessness and becoming a charity case to those around me.

Tennessee was calling and my Uncle Ed would house us until my mom found a decent job to pay monthly rent and bills. All I knew at the time about where Uncle Ed lived was that it was a fairly remote area in Northeast Tennessee. Telford is less than a 2 hour drive from the Tennessee-Virginia border.

The Trip Begins

The trip started on Monday, June 25 and ended on Saturday, June 30. The 2,400 mile trip took five days because my mother suffers from night-blindness and refused to drive late at night or very early in the morning. My mother drove the entire way: I had no driver’s license and my aunt was terrified of highways. We took our trip leisurely and enjoyed the scenery; taking breaks at most available rest stops to my mother could stretch her legs.

My aunt was deathly afraid of driving on freeways or interstates due to the mass number of semi-trucks. She lives in Chilhowie, Virginia and is used to small back-roads and was uneasy just hopping on I-81 to get to Bristol, Tennessee/Virginia. Chilhowie is located near Abingdon, in South-West Virginia and is a small local town more than a city. She was extremely excited to travel across the country because her world consisted of Chilhowie and not much else. A week before the trip, she flew out to California to sight see and spend time with family before my mom drove all three of us to Tennessee.

From the time we entered the car in Ventura until we ended our trip in Telford 5 days later, mommy and Aunt Ann were blasting Elton John and various oldies tunes. Don’t get me wrong; I grew up on my parents taste in music (Led Zeppelin, The Who, the Beatles, The Eagles, Elton John, The Kinks, etc.) and loved it, but I spent the majority of my time in the car reading Chuck Klosterman books and listening to The Get Up Kids and mix CDs of Australian Pop love songs using an old CD player and headphones.

“What should we listen to next?” said Aunt Ann after the first CD had ended about an hour into the trip.
“Start with the first CD in the case and we’ll work our way to the end,” replied Mom.

“What happens if we get to the end?” Ann asked cheerfully.

“We’ll just start it over!”

“So, I’m guessing the trip will include a whole lot of Elton John, huh?” I piped in. I was aware that the case held up to 50 CDs and contained a minimum of five Elton John albums, all next to each other.

Route 66/I-40

Our trip took us nearly from coast to coast, approximately 2,400 miles. We started on Hwy 101 near Ventura and continued onto Interstate 40 which includes much of what is famously known as Route 66 (Between California and Oklahoma). This route took us through many well-known cities, including: Flagstaff, AZ, Albuquerque, NM, Amarillo, TX, Oklahoma City, OK, Little Rock, AR, as well as Memphis, Nashville, and Knoxville, TN. When I looked at a map, it seemed as if we went through some of the Mojave, Great Basin, and the Sonoran deserts. We drove away from the California coast and through: Arizona, New Mexico, the Panhandle of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and most of Tennessee. The terrain was dry and flat until we reached Oklahoma. The main difference in desert terrain began in Texas. Texas had 100 times more cows than the other states combined. I had never seen so many cows in my life as I did in the Panhandle of Texas, which is less than 200 miles long.

Route my mom, aunt, and I took, starting in Ventura, CA and ending in Telford, TN. The red line shows Route 66/I-40

One thing I noticed was the change in temperature across the country. The middle of the country from Arizona to Oklahoma, is really hot in late June, and we were living out of suitcases while going from hot state to hotter state and from one Motel 6 to another. Oklahoma was very rainy so I slept through the majority of the state, waking up briefly only to fall back asleep after realizing the rain had no plans on stopping. Around the time we hit Arkansas, I started noticing a major change: Everything was green. We were out of the desert and approaching the mountains.

Roughly three-fourths of the way through Arizona, we got out of the car so we could pose for pictures because of the Eagles song “Take it Easy” in which Glenn Frey sings:

“Just find a place to make your stand
and take it easy.
Well, I'm a standing on a corner
in Winslow, Arizona
Such a fine sight to see” (Eagles, 1972)

Unfortunately, due to a lack of passers-by, we have no photo of all three of us, just several pairings of two at a time. To this day, my mom will tell people “I’ve stood on a corner in Winslow, Arizona with my daughter and little sister,” and people either have no idea why that’s amusing, or they get excited and want to see the picture. It looks like any corner in any city in the desert but it made Mommy happy.

The first night of the journey ended in Flagstaff, Arizona. We stayed at a Motel 6 located a few blocks away from a Sonic fast-food restaurant. I had never been to Sonic since there was not one in Ventura or any nearby city, but had seen various commercials for it. After we got settled in the motel I walked down the street to try my first Sonic slushie. During my leisurely walk I called some of my friends on my cell phone to brag about where I was going and one call was interrupted by a pick-up truck full of Mexican men, honking their horn and shouting at me. I was used to this because it was a common occurrence in California.

Half way through New Mexico my aunt exclaimed “There are 6 semi trucks surrounding us! There is no way I could drive!”

“Well, I guess I’m stuck driving then, huh?” my mother said, disappointed because Aunt Ann had previously said she would try to drive a few legs of the trip.

“Seriously? It’s like a Wall-Of-Semis!” I stated, half asleep.

My 50 year old, 90 pound, widowed mother of two (my sister and me) was in charge of driving the entire 2,400 mile trip on I-40, and I dubbed her the queen of driving cross country. I knew Mommy would get us there safe, sound, and not under a truck, but it seemed like every semi-truck in the country was driving on I-40 that week. My poor tiny mother drove as if her life depended on it because more often than not, we were surrounded on all sides by huge vehicles. Sometimes we would luck out and be surrounded by pick-up trucks with trailers and RV’s. I failed to completely understand the danger and terror because I had never driven a car. I later learned why driving next to or behind a semi-truck is scary. I finally understood why Driver’s Ed teachers warn you to be careful when driving near any large truck; they are intimidating and basically rule the roads.

Every day of the trip ended in a motel before sunset because my mother is incapable of driving after dark. Mommy preferred to stay in a Motel 6, but one night in Arkansas we stayed in an AmericInn because the rain was coming in buckets and we did not wish to risk our lives finding a motel. We settled for an overpriced hotel in lieu of my mother’s preference of Motel 6. Nevertheless, every night was the same thing. We would check into a motel and I would pick which of the 2 beds I wanted while my mom and aunt shared the other. I’ve never been good at sleeping in new places and these motel beds were no exception.

Final Destination

When we arrived, officially, in the state of Tennessee I was no more excited than when we entered Oklahoma. My mom pointed out somewhere in Memphis that we were crossing the Mississippi River. This only excited me enough to take some photos from the car window to document it. By this point I had pictures of cows, clouds, dirt, cows, deserts, sunsets, more cows, a giant cross, and rocks.

The entire state of Tennessee took one day to cross. We reached our destination at nearly dark o’clock on the last day of June to Telford. If you have never been to Telford, don’t worry- you’re not missing much. Telford is just outside of Jonesborough, TN (which I learned is the oldest town in the entire state). I was told “you blink and you miss it,” by my mother and that statement did not comfort me in the slightest. My Uncle Ed and his wife Penny hugged and kissed us and made dinner. I was still unhappy about the move but tried my best to make the best out of this situation.

Soon after arriving in Telford I sat down to write a few poems. One poem summarizes the trip nicely and I am still proud of this poem today because despite how unhappy I was to be away from home I managed to put a positive spin on the poem.

Deserts, cacti, farms and dirt.

Texas cows on planes so flat.

Nothing blocks “the view,”

No buildings, one highway.

Many trucks and rest stops.

No housing tracts or apartments,

No sky scrapers, malls,

Or giant fast food chain strips.

Just plants and cattle and Route 66

As far as the eye can see.

It all just looks the same.

All off ramps lead to gasoline

And small town shops and food.

Occasional well known junk food

Covered in fat and grease.

Let’s buy cheap crap items

At outrageous prices

To tell our friends we care.

I’ll send some postcards

With cows and cowboys and scenery

Scratching missing everyone

On the glossy paper cards

And tossing them in a mail box

Before hitting the road again.

Mommy and Aunt Ann had a blast on the trip. My aunt still wants my mom to take her the next time she travels cross country—I mean if she travels cross country again. I would love to repeat the adventure and I wouldn’t mind doing it again with family. Looking back, it was a lovely trip and I should have been more excited. Many people never leave their home state or if they do, odds are they traveled by plane. I got to see more of the country than most of my friends have and I took it for granted because I was a whiny little thing.

I would have enjoyed the trip a great deal more if I realized I could still be happy in Tennessee. I’ve still kept in touch with the friends in Ventura who mattered and I have made great friends in Tennessee. At the time of writing this I have a wonderful boyfriend, am attending a great college, I have a car, driver’s license, and a job. I’m glad I moved because I have broadened my horizons and I can now appreciate the things I took for granted. I despise freezing cold weather and icy roads but I have been able to enjoy a change of scenery.

One thing I am both amused and annoyed by is the presence of actual seasons; Southern California is not known for recognizable seasons, fall days may feel like summer days and a day in January may feel like a day in April. In Southern California the calendar is the only way you know which season you are in. Tennessee has snow in the winter, heat and humidity in the summer, leaves changing in the fall, and flowers coming into full bloom in the spring.

Reflection

As much as I miss my home town I could not imagine living even one state away from my mother because without her I would be homeless and miserable right now. I thank my mother for making me move with her and supporting me so I can get an education to be proud of and to grow up and become a wonderful woman to make my father proud. He is the reason we moved and I will make sure we did not move in vain.